his side

Spring semester of my freshman year had rolled around and I was the newly appointed worship leader for CRU (a campus ministry). This meant one thing, I needed to audition lots of people. The only problem with this was that, being myself an introvert, I had to talk to people. However, this was not a problem for a certain young woman. She marched down the stairs after our first meeting and introduced herself by saying something to the affect of "Hi, I'm Kadie and I'd like to join the worship team."

So we got in contact and scheduled an audition. She showed up to the audition and I asked for a little background about her. She told me she was from Chicago (which explained the Bears hat, jacket, and sweatshirt) and that she had transferred to UMBC the semester before. We spent a while chatting and finally got down to her singing for the audition. The first song she sang was How He Loves which I hadn't heard before. We played it almost every time she sang after that. Her voice was lovely, she meant the words and she had wonderful expression. She was in the band. 

We started hanging out through band practices and mutual friends. The more I got to know her the cooler she turned out to be. We talked about music and friends. I heard about how amazing Chicago was and about their sweet food. Then one day she asked if I could help out a friend of hers with a project. She said her friend needed to do a short film for a class and was wondering if we would sing How He Loves for it. I said of course because I like helping people and I'd get to hang out with Kadie. We got together and spent a couple of hours shooting the video. We played the song a couple of times and then got to hang out and chat some while her friend got some extra footage. Then we went our separate ways and headed home with a successful filming done.

A few weeks later I left for a trip to Florida with CRU for spring break. As I was hopping on our bus to get down there my friend Garrett stopped me and asked "Who are you texting?" I told him I was texting Kadie and he looked at me suspiciously and said "something going on there?" I laughed at him and told him I didn't think so (because I'm oblivious to a fault) and then spent the next 10 hours texting her. Kadie was in California and I'd always wanted to go so she was sending me pictures and telling me just how awesome it was out there. Our extensive texting continued through the remainder of the trip. 

When I finally got back from the trip Kadie texted me asking if we could skype. I said of course and we sat a chatted with each other for a bit. Eventually I got a bloody nose for absolutely no reason and had to end the chat early. Once that was taken care of I started on all of my neglected homework from spring break and texted Kadie some more. After a while I get a very distressed text from Kadie. She says her ex has just texted her and she's super annoyed by it because she's so done with guys. On top of that she tells me that I should be careful about what I ask her advice on because she likes me and it might be biased info. This was a lot of info to take in so I texted her back saying "That's a lot for me to process. Want to get coffee tomorrow?"

We met up the next day. My stomach was a bundle of confusion and campus food (so it was not pretty). I wanted to make sure that my friend was ok but I knew she liked me. So now I'm hanging out with a friend to make sure she's alright and in the back of my mind I'm thinking she's really cool. This could totally work. We're already awesome friends etc. etc. We get through our chat and she seems to be alright and has things under control. So we spend the next few days hanging out almost constantly until I had to go home for the weekend. 

That's when it hit me. I missed her. I spent all weekend hanging out with my family having fun and all I wanted to do was go back to school and hang out with Kadie. So I headed back to school and immediately went up to Kadie's. We hung out for a couple of hours until all of her roommates went to bed and we had some time alone. There was a bit more chatting until I finally asked her "dinner and a movie on Friday?" She said yes in the quietest way I'd ever heard her speak. It's the only time that I can remember her being so quiet. I could see how happy her eyes were, but I had to be careful because she was so excited that she became shy for possibly the first time in her life. 

We hung out every night that week until stupid late hours of the night. I told all my friends I was dating Kadie and wouldn't put it on Facebook until I'd told everyone. That's how it began. This is how it starts...